Queen of Bones

by Teresa Dovalpage

  “We’ll do whatever you want, Elsita,” he said soothingly. “Let’s not argue now, please. We’re together again, and that’s what matters. Because you’re my only true love.”

  “And you’re mine.”

  She tilted her head up and kissed him.

  It was finally happening, the thing he had always wanted. He said nothing, afraid to break the spell. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom, where there was a king-sized bed with a blue chenille bedspread that gave off a lavender fragrance. They lay there kissing until she slipped out of his arms. He thought she was about to take off her clothes, but then she walked out of the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s a surprise,” she said, smiling coyly, and disappeared into the bathroom.

  He looked around, admiring the carved furniture and the porcelain ornaments on the dresser. There was a big package next to them. From the bed he made out the recipient’s name, Emilio J. Savarria, and a Cambridge address. He jumped out of the bed. Elsa was still in the bathroom; he needed to act fast. He hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a piece of paper from the notepad and the pen with the Savarria logo and started writing down his son’s address.

  Part III

  El

  Monte

  Elegguá is the orisha of jokes, of the cruel, big, overwhelming jokes or small, irritating ironies: of the unexpected and unforeseen.—El Monte

  It’s over. I don’t have to wait for him to come back anymore. I don’t have to write him more letters, real or imaginary. I can just forget.

  When I saw him in the registros office, I was so happy I could’ve screamed, but I managed to play it cool, like a true daughter of Oyá. “Hello, Juan.” He was completely dumbfounded. His eyes almost popped out, as if he’d seen a ghost. I guess that’s all I am to him.

  But it turned out that he hadn’t gone to the cemetery looking for me. Either Oyá was wrong, or Elegguá got in the middle. Ah, the trickster! Well, at least I did my part. I confessed. I did the right thing, and my conscience is clear.

  I think finding the book shortly afterward was a good omen, a smoke signal that my orisha’s sending me from her kingdom of bones. A reward for my honesty. Because it can’t be a coincidence that I simply came upon it after so many years. Just lying there on the counter, as if it was waiting for me.

  After work, I passed by a souvenir stall on Línea Street. They’re everywhere now. Some are owned by the government and others, the most interesting ones, by individuals. This was a tiendita particular overflowing with merchandise: dream catchers, postcards with prayers, Santería dolls, rosaries and books. The cover caught my eye because of the graphic designer’s sophomoric idea of a Santería offering: three bananas, a whole pineapple—everybody knows you’re supposed to cut it before presenting it to the orishas—four candles and what looked like half a coconut. I snickered and picked up the volume out of curiosity. It was El Monte. The Cuban edition, published by Letras Cubanas in 1993.

  One might consider spending twelve CUCs for a book splurging. But I don’t splurge often, and this wasn’t just any book. It was the book, the one and only, by Lydia Cabrera, that Abuela had advised me to get at any cost. I paid for El Monte feeling important, almost like a foreigner, and the owner looked at me as if I were batshit crazy. After all, how many Cubans in their right mind would spend that much money on an old book?

  I was planning to start reading this evening, but Carlota called and offered to do my hair for free. (In truth, she wants me to be her guinea pig for a new Brazilian treatment she just bought.) I’ll try it and read later. And who knows? I may get a chance to see Armando and taste his renowned “rice with everything” tonight.

  A few months ago, I would have thought it impossible to forget Juan. But considering the way he treated me, the way he still is, I realize it’s time to move on. Maybe that was the point of our encounter, the orishas’ way of telling me that it’s over. And even if Juan looks good for his age, he’s still a run-of-the-mill forty-year-old guy. He isn’t my “one and only.” In fact, I wonder if there’s really a “one and only” for anybody. Armando can be my “next one.”

  1

  The Green Ray

  After sleeping for three hours, Sharon woke up hungry. She went down to the second mezzanine floor and discovered a restaurant called La Piazza, where she sat down and ordered a caprese salad and spaghetti Bolognese. The rich sauce was full of flavor and made her feel somewhat more reconciled with her Havana adventure. The walls were decorated with pictures of Cuban baseball players, which she found odd for an Italian place, but service was fast and the tablecloth clean. A glass of red wine restored her spirits.

  The only off-putting thing was that the waiter had brought a dish of fried plantains—fried in lard, ugh!—though she hadn’t ordered it. She took a bite, but they were too sweet and greasy and didn’t go with the rest of the meal. Had it happened in her country, she would have sent back the dish immediately, but here . . . The politically incorrect ghost of the ugly American hovered over her as she stared at the lard-dripping plantains. She let it go and didn’t even protest when the dish was included on the bill.

  Later that afternoon, she took a dip in the hotel pool. The water was warm and crystal clear. In the gift shop, she bought two psychedelic gourd shakers for her daughter, a straw hat for Meredith, a bottle of Havana Club Siete Años to share with Juan and a glittering black coral necklace for herself. She didn’t know if it was even legal to bring it back home, and she wasn’t usually into flashy jewelry, but the strand of polished beads attracted her with irresistible, unexplainable force. She put it on right away and returned to the room to wait for Juan. Now that she was feeling rested, she had thought of a few questions that hadn’t occurred to her at first.

  Above all, she wanted to know more about Elsa. She would come clean and admit she had followed Juan the first day, then returned to Víctor’s place the second. She still believed Juan’s story, but some details didn’t jibe. Why had he planned on lunch at Víctor’s without her? Had Elsa been invited too? She wanted the full truth.

  A construction crew was hanging a ten-foot banner across a section of the Malecón wall. They moved at a leisurely pace, often stopping to catcall the women who passed by and stare at the boats sailing across the bay. Sharon craned her neck from her seat on the balcony, trying to read the banner and expecting to see the “green flash.”

  A while back, she had watched the 1986 movie The Green Ray with Juan. He had loved it and often quoted the line “When you see the green ray, you can read your own feelings and others’ too.”

  Time passed slowly as Sharon waited in the hotel room. The blue waters turned a deep indigo under the watchful eye of the Morro Castle lighthouse, and the sun, now red, sank beneath the horizon. Sharon had a brief glimpse of a lime-colored flash that could very well have been the green ray. A pity Juan wasn’t there to see it. She looked at her watch and started fingering her new necklace. It was close to seven. Maybe Juan was still with his grandmother. What a long visit! But, of course, they had a lot to talk about after so many years. Sharon had no reason to fret.

  The first stars appeared, but Juan still didn’t return. Sharon became agitated. As another hour went by, she felt the crude, unforgiving light of the green ray piercing the darkness of her trust. Juan had lied to her. He had never really loved her, and she had been blind to reality. Was he with another woman? Elsa? Could he—oh, even the thought of it made her feel sick—could he have been involved in Víctor’s death? Had he killed his friend? Was that why he hadn’t wanted her to go with him?

  By nine-thirty, Sharon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She tried calling Juan, but he didn’t answer. She discovered his cell phone, turned off, on the nightstand. She turned it on and entered his password—it was a lazy one, the last four digits of his number. There were two new messages. The first voice mail was blank, and the second had b
een left by a man named Padrino (Had she heard that correctly? “Godfather”? Whose godfather?) urging Juan to call him back as soon as he had the chance. It was “a very important issue,” he said gravely. She called the number he’d left, but nobody answered. A generic message said that the user wasn’t available.

  Had something happened to Juan’s grandmother? Sharon wished she had asked him the name of the nursing home. But he couldn’t still be there, not after more than nine hours. If something had happened to the old lady, if she’d been taken to the hospital, he would have called the hotel.

  At 11 p.m., she wondered if the police might know something about where he was. What if he’d been arrested again? She got the number of Unidad 15 from the front desk and asked for Lieutenant Martínez. She wasn’t there, the clerk who answered told Sharon in a sleepy voice. When Sharon asked if Juan Chiong had been taken back to the police station, the clerk said no and wanted to know who was calling and why. Sharon hung up.

  What if he’d had an accident? Or had been mugged? Or hurt? But Cuba was supposed to be safe! She could only recall one recent incident of a foreigner being harmed here, a Canadian tourist who had fallen from the fourth-floor balcony of a Varadero hotel. It wasn’t clear yet whether it had been intentional.

  She started pacing the room. The minutes stretched interminably to midnight and spilled into the early morning. Another long, sleepless night.

  At seven-thirty in the morning, when she looked outside again, the banner was finally in place. It read in bright red letters: welcome to havana. my city is your house.

  Sharon spat out the window.

  The detectives arrived at ten o’clock. The front desk clerk called and asked Sharon to come down, explaining that “the authority” was there to talk to her. She hurried to the lobby, expecting to see Lieutenant Martínez again, but this time around “the authority” was a thirtysomething woman and an older gray-haired man. The woman wore a plain brown dress, and he a white guayabera and blue jeans.

  “Good afternoon, Señora,” the woman said. “I’m Agent Alicia, and this is Agent Pedro. We work for the Ministry of the Interior.”

  A government branch? Didn’t they have last names? Were they cops? They weren’t in uniform like Lieutenant Martínez.

  “We’re from La Seguridad,” Agent Pedro offered, noting her bewilderment.

  That wasn’t much help. Wasn’t La Seguridad the political police? Sharon stared blankly at them.

  “Is something wrong?” She tried not to fumble her words. “What do you need from me?”

  “Are you Juan Chiong’s wife?” Agent Alicia asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Sharon answered in a weak, shaky voice that sounded too much like Meredith’s.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. I—I’ve been trying to call him since yesterday.”

  A brief, uncomfortable pause followed. Their faces, somber and excessively courteous, told Sharon what they were going to say before the words were uttered.

  “A man who could be him was found dead,” Agent Pedro said. “You need to come with us to Calixto García Hospital to identify the body.”

  Sharon swallowed hard, holding back tears.

  “He’s been missing since yesterday morning,” she muttered. “What happened to him? Did you say that he might be—dead?”

  “We aren’t sure it’s him,” Agent Pedro said.

  She felt dizzy. Everything from that moment on happened in slow motion: the walk to the car—an unmarked Lada waiting outside the hotel; the short ride through a city that had suddenly become menacing; the explanations offered by the Seguridad people that didn’t make any sense to her.

  Agent Alicia sat with Sharon in the back seat and spoke in a hushed manner while Agent Pedro drove. That day, at six in the morning, a man had been found dead in El Quijote Park. His body had been brought to the nearest hospital, Calixto García. The man had died of a single shot to the chest fired at close range. A note crumpled in his hands said he was so depressed that he had decided to take his own life.

  “But Juan was never depressed or suicidal!” Sharon said.

  She felt a brief twinge of hope. Could it be someone else after all?

  “We don’t know if the letter is real,” Agent Alicia answered. “Or if this man is actually your husband. He didn’t have any identification papers, and we haven’t located the weapon either.”

  Sharon looked out the window. They were now in a down-and-dirty neighborhood. She let out a long breath, fighting off the irrational fear that this was all a plot to kidnap her.

  “What makes you think it’s him?” she asked.

  “A mortician who happened to be at the hospital recognized him as a former classmate,” Agent Alicia said.

  How surreal.

  “You mean a musician?” Sharon asked.

  “No, a mortician. She said they had gone to college together. She gave us his full name. We searched the records of newly arrived passengers and found his hotel on the list.” Agent Alicia looked Sharon straight in the eye. “We also found out he had been questioned about the death of a Cuban transvestite killed two days ago. Do you know anything about that? Were you aware of any ties between your husband and any local gay groups?”

  No, Sharon said, she knew Juan didn’t belong to any groups. As the Seguridad woman continued to speak, Spanish sounded more foreign to Sharon than ever before. It had become cryptic, a puzzle of broken syllables and unintelligible phrases. Suicide? A mortician claiming to be Juan’s old classmate? It was all absurd. Ridiculous. She was sure he was somewhere else, maybe in a motel with that damn Elsa. For a moment, she desperately wished he was. Better unfaithful than dead. Let all this be a mistake, she prayed silently.

  They got to Calixto García Hospital. It wasn’t just a hospital, as Sharon had expected, but a compound made up of over a dozen buildings. They had to wait at a gate while Agent Pedro showed his ID. After the car was allowed entry, he parked in an empty lot and guided them to a house with the words pathology department inked in Gothic characters on the facade.

  The lobby had cracked marble floors. A single Cuban flag hung from the ceiling. A bulletin board displayed newspaper pages and printed notes. Two nurses noticed the trio of newcomers and started whispering. But that barely registered with Sharon. She followed the Seguridad agents to an office, making an effort to remain composed.

  A hospital employee led the group to the end of a corridor. There, in a small tiled room that smelled strongly of disinfectant, a woman was bent over a stretcher where a nearly naked man lay. She didn’t move when Sharon and her companions came in. Sharon ran to the stretcher. The other woman’s hands rested on Juan’s chest in a gesture that was both protective and rapacious, tender and fierce.

  Next to the woman, as if reassuring her, was a man dressed completely in white aside from a series of colorful beaded necklaces. Sharon backed off, wanting to wake up from the tragic nightmare that her Cuban trip had become.

  2

  Padrino’s First Mistake

  When Padrino had visited the Savarria and Co. office, he’d encountered the same reception that Juan had. Only less warm, as he was clearly Cuban and didn’t look like someone who could do business with a foreign company or even like he had a dollar to spare. But after being approached by the taller woman, he had also agreed to pay for Señora Dieguez’s address. All he had been able to come up with was 50 CUCs and 300 Cuban pesos.

  “I’m only giving you a discount because you’re a fellow Cuban and santero,” the woman had said with a wink. “Pray to Oshún for me, my friend, so I can find a wealthy foreigner to drain like my boss did.”

  “We can work on it,” Padrino had joked. “So you think that Señora Dieguez . . . ?”

  She shook her head. “Look, Señor Savarria is almost eighty years old, with white hair, a big belly, warts everywhere. Don’t tell me a woman like E
lsa is madly in love with him, or ever was.” She laughed. “She was lucky; that’s all.”

  Padrino found Elsa’s house and stood outside, watching it. He had parked his VW Beetle three blocks away, something he would refer to later as his first mistake. He had thought the old beaten-up car would attract too much attention in a neighborhood where most houses had newer and cleaner vehicles inside their garages or out on the curb.

  It was a quarter to noon. He saw Elsa leave in a Lexus but didn’t try to follow her. In fact, he didn’t even think of her as a suspect. There was the remote possibility that she was the woman with the red umbrella that Magdala had seen, but he doubted it. He stayed because she was the only tangible link he had to the case, through the phone call Víctor had made shortly before his death. He was just thinking about the best way to approach her again. Then he would meet with Magdala. Ah, he would give her a piece of his mind for failing to mention the maría issue! He was almost tempted to drop the whole thing and let Pepito suffer the consequences of his actions. He didn’t, because he was sure Pepito hadn’t killed anyone and didn’t want him taking the rap for it. Padrino had known the young man since he was fifteen. At least he thought he’d known him. And Padrino was also intrigued. Was that Cuban American that Marlene had mentioned the one whom Víctor had called? He wished he could tell her all he knew, but she wasn’t in when he called the police headquarters. Maybe it was better to just wait.

  The Lexus returned. Elsa went back in the house with two bags bearing the Habana Libre Hotel logo. Ten minutes later, a man arrived. He was of medium build and well dressed and looked very intent on where he was going. He went straight up to Elsa’s door and, after a brief moment of hesitation, rang the bell. She came out, and Padrino managed to snap a picture of her with his cell phone. They appeared to be arguing at first, but finally the man went in, and Elsa closed the door.